How could multiple utilities providers compete and both potentially offer services to households? This is not a veiled attack on anarcho-capitalism, as I am one, but my Macroeconomics class was talking about “public goods” and I got to thinking about this one.
How is anything else provided? No one knows specifics as to the various different methods which might be tried and which might be best. However the usual public goods objections can be addressed, as can natural monopoly claims. More specifically, arguing over how utilities would provide electricity, for example, assumes that there need be a provider even though people might find it easier to stick a solar panel array on their roof or get a generator/battery set up of some kind with regular fuel deliveries to a tank, fuel to be determined. In other words, once you start arguing about how utilities would provide this or that, you already cede the ground that a certain model is necessary and the argument becomes who is the more convincing central planner.
There are many articles on this site dealing with the fallacies and historical inaccuracies of public goods and natural monopoly theories. Look 'em up.
Who says we need utility providers?
In the desert in New Mexico, people have built self-sufficient houses out of reclaimed/recycled materials called “Earthships”. This is a place that gets something like 6 inches of rain annually, and yet these buildings have their own water purification/filtration and wastewater treatment, solar powered mostly, micro-farms, etc. If you can do something like that, in an environment as inhospitable as the NM desert, the possibilities are almost endless.
There’s also satellite TV programming and XM radio and what-not. “The Grid” is becoming obsolete, and quickly.
It’s likely that, absent monopoly provision of utilities, another arrangement altogether would’ve developed naturally. It’s like when people say, “Jeez, without the Post Office, who would deliver mail to extremely rural areas?” The answer is either A) it would be provided privately and at an appropriate price (more expensive, probably) or B) people wouldn’t be as likely to live in extremely rural areas.
Same thing with levees like near New Orleans or “fire insurance” in wildfire areas in CA: either they’re provided by and for the people who live there and want them, or they’re never provided and practically nobody would live in high-risk areas like that. (see my post, If You Subsidize It…)
Practically speaking, there are alternatives. The only unresolved problem is: what to do with what already exists? I suggest a gradual winding-down of our reliance on these old-school systems, ushered in by competitive enterprise and new models of self-reliance or communal-reliance, probably.
If you move to free market provision of these things, the worst that can happen is a monopoly (what we have now). Trying for decentralization is a no-risk scenario.
Take a look at this huge thread. It started out as a discussion about street cleaners but gradually morphed in to a more general discussion about utilities. There were many flames, but plenty of very interesting contributions too.